THE BUSINESS OF SMALL BUSINESS
John Q. Pridger
Once upon a time, long before we reached the apex of national industrial prosperity, America was a nation of farmers, shopkeepers, and small and large business enterprises and factories. We had a free market system and free enterprise system which was the envy of the world. This system was capable of providing for sustainable prosperity and for the happiness and security of the people. But then ignorance, avarice, and fully informed self interest, combined with government to bring down that free enterprise system.
Big business — very big business — began getting the upper hand on the people during the Civil War. But it took another century to destroy the natural free enterprise system that we had and replace it with a corporate free enterprise system, wherein the "American Dream" for a majority of the people became to have a good job working for corporate America and a house in the suburbs. A large, prosperous, working middle class had developed. By the 1950s, large and small employers were beginning to provide employees with pension plans and health insurance in addition to good wages. Productive efficiency was such that it seemed the three or four day workweek, and six hour workday, were just around the corner. The nation was economically unassailable, and it appeared that the American capitalist system was the model by which the world itself might pull itself up by the boot straps and provide prosperity for all.
But this broad-based prosperity in the greatest, most powerful, nation in the world was doomed. Not because it was unsustainable, but because there were too many in the halls of power and influence with a much "larger vision." Among their gods were speed, efficiencies of scale, and ever-larger bottom lines — and their field of vision was not the nation, but the world itself. They felt that if the American capitalist system could deliver the goods in America, it could deliver the goods to the world (at least that was the sales pitch) — and thereby they could insure their own growing perpetual profit while embarking on an altruistic program nobody of any consequence would oppose.
Still, circa 1950s and 1960s, too many small family farmers survived, and the nation's retail and service trades were still in the hands of too many individuals and and non-corporate families. This was soon to be remedied. Government and big capital, combined with an array of social activists, who believed in ever-bigger government, continued to stack the deck against small business and free enterprise. A totally new social order began rearing its ugly head with a vengeance and government-empowered vigor from the 1960s on. By 1980 the nation was ripe for a wholesale betrayal of the people by their government, and corporate globalism became national policy. Significantly, the final destruction of the American free enterprise system was ushered in by a popular "conservative" Republican president, under the banners of free enterprise and free markets — for the world.
Pridger has covered various aspects of this disastrous national transformation before. It's a complex subject, almost impossible to get into anything like single overview. Here Pridger intends to show only a small result of bad national policies which has continued to focus on the world rather than the nation, and thus to betray the American people.
Today the millions of small family farmers that once provided the bed-rock, balance wheel, and sustenance insurance policy of the nation, are largely gone — replaced by a huge petro-chemical based corporate agribusiness complex. The farmers gave up their small businesses and went to the large urban areas to get good jobs in industry.
The official policy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was "Get big or get out!" — and the USDA was there to help the farmer out. So most of the farmers are now out and gone, both as a class of people and as a meaningful political force — replaced, as a political power base, by the agribusiness lobby, still called erroneously called an American farmers' lobby. Yet, farmers, and the small family farm, were the most critically important and dependably productive "small businesses" in the nation.
As Thomas Jefferson once said: "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds." But they have been shorn of those bonds and their independence.
With the transformation of the agricultural sector, and the sustained precipitous decline of rural populations, small town America began to implode, and small towns throughout the nation fell into decline. The small businesses that depended on the farmers of their hinterlands began to fail — replaced by concentrated corporate operations based in the large market centers. The displaced small businessmen went to the big cities to get good industrial jobs.
Not all of the displaced farmers and small businessmen, and their children, could become doctors, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, stockbrokers, and financial advisors. Most of them had to go to work in the innumerable factories and other corporate concerns that once provided a proliferation of good jobs.
Civil rights and forced integration then began to transform the urban centers to which displaced farmers and small businessmen had migrated. Most of our greatest cities and industrial areas began to fall into decline, as whites voted in the only manner their government left open to them — with their feet. Suburbia mushroomed and sprawled with new business "centers" springing up like mushrooms. This, of course, spelled much great opportunity for new small businesses to form. But an increasing percentage of the new businesses were corporate in nature, and retail giants began to displace more and more locally owned businesses and mom and pop operations throughout the land.
The following appointment announcement recently appeared in Pridger's local paper. (Names have been changed to avoid embarrassment and avoid the possible litigation made possible by the American "sue-age system."):
"Jane Doe, supervisor of client services for the Small Business Development Center of "Hometown College," has been appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Illinois Small Business Development Association. The 18-member council serves as a governing board for the Illinois Small Business Development Association, whose mission is to provide support for small businesses through continuing professional development, networking and a recognized certification program for small business professionals throughout Illinois. Ms. Doe is an ISBDA certified Business Specialist. Contact "Hometown's" Small Business Development Center, or visit the web-site for more information about services available to Illinois small business owners."
This is evidence of state government committed to "helping" small businesses.